Caption Humor

aka: Caption Humour

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The use of captions in visual media in order to invoke a humorous effect. Specifically, the caption uses the scene as a joke setup and delivers a punchline to it. This includes commenting the scene, pointing out the obvious or even absolute non sequiturs.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is designed to look like a photocopied version of Harry Potter's original. He, Ron, and Hermione have scrawled numerous notes in the margins, from commenting that Hagrid will be getting a certain dangerous creature any day now to the arachnophobic Ron increasing the danger level for acromantulas significantly to continuity nods (for example, in Prisoner of Azkaban, Snape claims the kappa is found in Mongolia; one of Harry's notes has the sentence stating that the kappa is Japanese underlined and a scrawled "Snape hasn't read this").

And the "Architects" sketch, in which the caption "SATIRE" starts flashing over a very obvious piece of satire.

There was a very similar thing in the opening of The Day Today: Chris Morris would read out an ostensible headline and then a piece of genuine news footage would play to humourous effect.

Hey Hey Its Saturday would have amusing sarcastic captions show up every now and again. Caricatures of the guests would serve the same purpose. Note: these were all done live.

Burn Notice initially used captions to identify people that Michael was dealing with, but they have started to become more comical, such as repeating an earlier assessment of a character, identifying them as "Arrogant Jerk" or something similar.

Much of the humor of "The Word" segments on The Colbert Report arises from the captions at the side of the screen, clarifying or elaborating upon what Stephen says aloud.

Sometimes the captions take a life of their own. When Colbert started bashing on Islam in one episode, the captions tried to leave, but Colbert forced them to stay.

The Revolution Will Be Televised has a recurring segment called "Honest Subtitles", in which various politicians have their speeches replayed, only stripped of their flowery speech to reflect their (possible) true meaning.

Magazines

Regular feature of any magazine aimed at young adults. Particularly the case in lad's mags like FHM and Loaded.

Often used on Flickr, especially with photos of museum displays where the real exhibit caption can't be seen. One example had a human standing next to a rocket for scale and the caption was: "You should never stand this close to a rocket. Unless you are demonstrating how cool it is."

In The Onion AV Club, they used to do a humorous caption for a pic from one of the movies being reviewed that week, but they haven't done it in years.

KurtJMac would often use the affectionately-dubbed 'snarky yellow text' to make fun of himself in early Far Lands or Bust episodes. It would also supply additional information, such as when a word was on the tip of his tongue and he couldn't quite remember it.

Chuggaaconroy usually uses captions when he catches a contradiction to his commentary in post-processing (sometimes to humorous effect). This extends to videos on The Runaway Guys, since Chugga also edits those videos (which is Played for Laughs by ProtonJon a couple of times).

RockedReviews indulges in this. Much of the comic relief of the show comes from speech bubbles that add jokes or witty insight into a band or event he's talking about, or just add humor to whatever picture's being shown.

In "Wackiki Wabbit," Bugs Bunny poses as an island native for the benefit of two castaways. He utters a lengthy sentence in native gibberish and the caption simply reads "What's up, doc?". He utters four syllables in the same tongue and the caption reads "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party."

The Animaniacs segment "Space Probed" has an alien abducting the Warners and telling his brethren, through captions, "There are typical Earth creatures." The Warners then rearrange the words to read "Are these typical Earth creatures?" before making funny faces.

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